A cognitive approach to program understanding

A Knowledge-Based Approach to Program Understanding

“…Most of the automated program understanding approaches produce program documentation which is, more or less, in the form of structured natural language text [1,2,4,6,7,8,10,12,13]. Such informal documentation gives expressive and intuitive descriptions of the code.…”

“…Another hybrid analysis approach was developed by Bertels [12]. The understanding of a program is performed bottom-up by, first, transforming it into an internal representation that is independent of the programming language and the chosen syntactic implementation.…”

A method for documenting code components

“…Different automation approaches generate program documentation that assists in the understanding process and in recording the results of this understanding. Some of these approaches generate informal program documentation that gives expressive and intuitive descriptions of the code (Bertels et al, 1993;Harandi and Ning, 1990;Hartman, 1991;Johnson and Soloway, 1985;Quilici, 1993;Letovsky, 1987;Rich and Wills, 1990). However, there is no semantic basis that makes it possible to determine whether the documentation has the desired meaning.…”